Don't trust the authorities on metadata: Greens

Hannah Francis

Western Australia senator Scott Ludlam has labelled Attorney-General George Brandis "weak" and told Australians not to trust the government and law enforcement agencies when it comes to trawling through their metadata.

"We should not trust authorities, we should not automatically trust the police," the Greens senator said at a privacy forum in Melbourne on Friday.

"We should not trust government – God knows, having spent a little bit of time on [Canberra's] capital hill, don't trust these people."

The final of three tranches of amendments to national security legislation, expected to be introduced at the end of October, would force telecommunications companies to retain customer metadata for up to two years.

Speaking at the Privacy Workshop, organised by Electronic Frontiers Australia and Electron Workshop, Senator Ludlam said allowing it to pass would be an "act of wanton stupidity" in breach of the Australian Privacy Principles.

"That needle that Prime Minister Abbott said had to move away from freedom and towards security has actually been blown off the map," he said.

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"This has been something that has been submerged and operating subliminally through the Attorney-General's office since at least 2008, and finally the Attorney-General's Department has found themselves a weak and compliant Attorney-General who will just do whatever they say."

The Attorney-General's office declined to comment.

Senator Brandis has come under fire for failing to clearly define what "metadata" would encompass in regards to the legislation, but told Parliament a "statutory definition" would be included in the bill.

The "essential concept" was that it was "information about the communication, not the content or the substance of the communication", he said.

Senator Ludlam countered this, saying metadata was "not the envelope, it's the content" as authorities could glean specific and detailed information, such as a person's exact day-to-day movements and the identities of individuals they had contacted, by mapping multiple sets of metadata.

Pointing to the 340,000 requests for metadata already made by "hundreds" of government agencies in 2012-13, Senator Ludlam said Australia's national security legislation "needs a rewrite, not an amendment".

The Greens were in the process of compiling recommendations around new security legislation "fit for the 21st century", he said.

However, the senator stopped short of saying the party would draft a new bill; instead, it would wait to see what the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security recommended on the forthcoming bill. The Greens are not part of the committee.

The committee on Friday called for the second tranche of amendments, known as the Foreign Fighters Bill and currently before the Senate, to be watered down.

Senator Ludlam slammed the Labor Party for "cowering under their desks" in support of the first tranche of amendments, which was passed three weeks ago with bipartisan support. The bill included beefed up powers for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and sentences of up to 10 years' jail for reporting on "special" security operations.